I am setting up a new Windows Server 2008-based domain and I am thinking about the domain name. Some time ago I read some documentation from Microsoft where they advised to use a .local suffix for "internal", corporate domains so that they do not clash with public, internet-exposed domains. For example, if my company is called Acme and our publicly visible domain (including a web site hosted with a colo provider) is acme.com
, then our "internal" Windows domain should be named acme.local
.
However, some time later I read some other documentation from Microsoft where they contradicted this and advised against it.
What do you think? What's the best way to name an internal domain? Any relevant experiences?
Edit. It seems that, despite of recommending against using the .local suffix for "internal" networks, Microsoft does impose it on some products such as SBS. Are there any reasons why using .local would be clearly a problem?
Thanks.